Smoke net is a lightweight monitoring tool that captures and logs network traffic for security analysis and troubleshooting. Designed for small teams and individual operators, it provides clear visibility into packet flows without the overhead of heavy agents.
Organizations use smoke net to baseline normal behavior, detect anomalies, and verify firewall rules in real time. Its compact footprint makes it suitable for edge devices and temporary deployments where resource usage must remain minimal.
| Feature | Description | Use Case | Benefit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Passive capture | Listens on a port or interface without injecting traffic | Safe monitoring of production systems | Zero risk of disrupting live services |
| Filter expressions | Capture only selected protocols, ports, or IPs | Focus on suspicious traffic patterns | td>Reduces noise and storage requirements|
| Session reassembly | Reconstructs TCP and UDP streams for inspection | Analyze application payloads and commands | Simplifies incident investigation |
| JSON export | Structured logs compatible with SIEM tools | Integration with existing security stacks | Enables automated alerting and correlation |
Deployment Architecture
Smoke net runs on a dedicated monitoring host with port mirroring or taps feeding traffic into a designated span port. The capture engine uses ring buffers to prevent disk exhaustion and drops packets gracefully when overloaded, preserving metric continuity.
Each instance exposes a compact dashboard that shows live flows, protocol distribution, and error counters. Teams can scale horizontally by adding more sensors and aggregating their outputs into a central collector for correlation.
Privacy and Compliance
By default, smoke net masks payload content and truncates personal data fields to align with privacy policies. Admins can enable full payload logging in isolated labs while keeping production captures content-aware and anonymized.
Compliance mappings are provided for common frameworks, showing how captured metadata supports audit trails without retaining sensitive information in clear text.
Threat Detection Patterns
Smoke net includes built-in patterns that flag common reconnaissance and exploitation behavior, such as unusual port sweeps, malformed headers, and known malicious payload signatures. These patterns trigger alerts that can be forwarded to ticketing systems for rapid response.
Operators can tune thresholds, suppress benign alerts, and add custom rules to match organization-specific threat models, keeping the detection surface relevant and manageable.
Performance and Scaling
On modern hardware, smoke net handles line-rate traffic on 1 Gbps interfaces with minimal packet loss. It leverages zero-copy buffering and multi-core polling to maximize throughput while keeping CPU usage predictable.
For 10 Gbps environments, teams can deploy load-balanced sensor clusters and use hash-based distribution to maintain per-flow ordering and accurate metrics across the infrastructure.
Operational Best Practices
- Use dedicated span ports or trusted taps to avoid packet drops during peak load
- Apply precise filter expressions to limit captured traffic to relevant segments
- Rotate and archive logs regularly to preserve disk health and performance
- Integrate smoke net outputs with SIEM platforms for centralized correlation
- Periodically review and tune detection patterns to reduce false positives
- Document sensor placement and access controls as part of change management
FAQ
Reader questions
Can smoke net decrypt TLS traffic for inspection?
No, smoke net captures encrypted traffic as-is and does not perform TLS decryption. To inspect content, pair it with a trusted SSL/TLS termination point that exports keys in a secure, auditable manner.
How much storage is required for a week of captures at 100 Mbps?
At 100 Mbps of average traffic, smoke net typically uses 8–12 GB of storage per week when using session summaries and metadata. Enabling full payload capture or longer retention will increase usage proportionally.
Does smoke net support high availability setups?
Yes, smoke net supports active–passive and active–active high availability using floating IPs and shared storage for configuration. State synchronization ensures consistent policies and avoids split-brain scenarios across sensor pairs.
Is smoke net suitable for regulated industries such as finance or healthcare?
Smoke net is suitable for regulated industries when configured with content masking, strict access controls, and encrypted log storage. It includes audit logging and role-based permissions to meet compliance requirements without exposing raw sensitive data.